Journal Communities & Asking For Help

I once again returned to the Livejournal environment to complete this assignment, taking another look at the 'communities' that I mentioned last time. As a reminder - Livejournal is a blog service much like Blogger, with the additional feature that they allow group accounts - referred to as communities, where members are able to join and post. As a user, you can 'friend' (this is the equivalent of subscribing) to other journals and communities, and whatever entries that are posted by your friends shows up on your 'friends' page, like a RSS feed.

Communities on Livejournal usually have a common theme. They are built up on one specific common ground - an interest in something. For example, there are communities for fans of a TV show, and from that, there are even communities that branch off for fans that like specific characters of that TV show, for fans that only want to hear about new episodes and not about other discussion, for fans that want to share related pictures, etc. There are, as a result, many communities for many levels of common ground that users share. The community I looked at was a community for users of a digital art program, called openCanvas.

The members of this community were the 'actors', and on the community, they posted their work for critiques, or requests for assistance on how to work the program, asking for tips, feedback, or any other topic that related to the program, which serve as the basis for relations in the network. In a task-oriented community like the one I am describing, where all discussion occurs over the topic of a specific action a member wants to accomplish, most of the ties are weak between the actors. It is uncommon that people refer to each other by name rather than username, even if they have communicated before. Speech is usually relatively formal and to-the-point, and though lurkers exist, generally people give help when they can, and requests for help are usually answered.

(However, there are other communities that focus on different things, where members create very strong ties over time, after discussing their common interest, and they not only communicate via the community, but across their own personal journals as well.)

I think the fact that it is online helps the efficiency of this task-oriented community. There is no need for pleasantries or other conversation that a face-to-face request for help may require. In addition, asking for help is sometimes somewhat embarrassing, especially when you think it's something that you should already know, so the online medium may help relieve some of that stress (as we discussed, when the valence is negative and the focus is on the self, people prefer CMC communication.) For the purpose for which it's created, I think the online environment suits this community well.